Reborn: Heartbreak, Healing and Archive Fertility

On the second day of this past weekend’s Last is a Verb: Archiving After the End of the World Intensive we faced the heartbreak of apocalyptic archiving. We wrote and talked about how much it hurts for the insurgent worlds of our people to end, how much it hurts when the material we see as sacred is undervalued by the institutions where we work, how much it hurts to see the systemic violences that make our archiving necessary reproduced in the destinies of those archives. And how necessary our heartbreak, our full and burning witness is to the world we deserve. June Jordan’s heartbreak poems about a devastating break up (the correspondence related to which she has sealed in her own archival papers for the next hundred years) guided us to go deep and emerge in flames. We activated our phoenix subjectivity and thought about what we burn and what we would keep about our whole society. We reminded ourselves how much we wanted to be as transformative and agile and undeniable as fire.

June Jordan’s mentor and mother-figure Fannie Lou Hamer who was also a researcher whose freedom practice and political vision was informed by her own research and interpretation of slave ledgers and the songs passed down from her enslaved grandmother, guided us to remember the nutrients in the ashes and to add our own seeds to a homemade field of love (like the one June Jordan write about in her tribute poem to Fannie Lou Hamer.) So out of heartbreak, we were reborn. (Did I mention that one of our brilliant participants actually has the same birthday as Fannie Lou Hamer?) We co-midwived each other into a field of possibility shaped by, but beyond our critiques of the fields where we do our work. This is our rebirth poem.